The Study Authors Have Calculated The Cost Of The “lost Ecosystem Services Value” Our Planet Has

The UK’s first new nuclear power station for a generation will cost electricity customers at least £4.4bn and the subsidy bill could reach £20bn, the government has revealed. 

 The charges, which will be passed on to nearly 30 million customers, are a result of ministers’ decision to guarantee the new Hinkley Point C operators £92.50 for every unit of electricity – more than double the current market price. 

 It comes less than a week after the government admitted the £24bn plant in Somerset will be subsidised – something it denied throughout the last parliament. 

Details of the costs – an average of about £150 to £660 per customer over the 35 years of the deal – are exposed in a document quietly put before parliament last week and which has only just come to light.

(via Hinkley Point C will cost customers at least £4.4bn | Environment | The Guardian)

When’s the last time you thought about the revolving door? This modest invention—something you likely encounter with a sense of dread while rushing off to the office or airport—is something of a modern miracle. Every time a revolving door rotates, it generates enough electricity to power a 60-watt light bulb for 23 minutes, equalizes indoor temperatures, and reduces carbon output—ultimately slowing climate change.

Revolving Doors Are an Energy Powerhouse. Why Don’t We Use Them? | GOOD

On April 26, 1986, a power surge caused an explosion at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant near Pripyat, Ukraine. A large quantity of radioactive material was released.

On May 2, 1986, the Soviet government established a “Zone of Alienation” or “Exclusion Zone” around Chernobyl – a thousand square miles of “radioactive wasteland.” All humans were evacuated. The town of Pripyat was completely abandoned.

But the animals didn’t leave. And a new study, published this month in Current Biology, suggests they are doing fine. “None of our three hypotheses postulating radiation damage to large mammal populations at Chernobyl were supported by the empirical evidence,” says Jim Beasley, one of the researchers.

In fact, some of the populations have grown. These photos (mostly taken by Valeriy Yurko) come from the Belarusian side of the Exclusion Zone, and area called the Polessye State Radioecological Reserve. Kingfisher, elk, boar, baby spotted eagles, wild ponies, moose, rabbits, and wolves all make their home in the park. In some ways, human presence is worse for wildlife than a nuclear disaster.

Image credits:

1986 Chernobyl - ZUFAROV/AFP/Getty Images

Wildlife photos - Valeriy Yurko/Polessye State Radioecological Reserve

Ponies in winter - SERGEI SUPINSKY/AFP/Getty Images

Project Monsoon  Clever colorful street art that only appears when it rains

After the Superhydrophobic Street Art, which uses a superhydrophobic coating to create designs which appear only in the rain, here is the Project Monsoon, which uses the same concept, this time with hydrochromic painting, which reveals its color only when wet. This amazing and clever project was designed by a Korean team of designers, in collaboration with Pantone, to provide color to the streets of Seoul during the rainy season, while paying tribute to the Korean culture. A brilliant idea! Source: ufunk 

Jason Ratiff | "Super Shadows”

Meet the 13-year-old who just built a cheap Braille printer out of Legos 

Whatever you were doing in eighth grade, it probably wasn’t as awesome as what Shubham Banerjee has been up to.

The California 13-year-old wanted to know how blind people read, so he searched online and was shocked to find Braille printers cost up to $2,000.

“I know that there is a simpler way to do this.”

What I didn’t know at the time was that this is what time is like for most women: fragmented, interrupted by child care and housework. Whatever leisure time they have is often devoted to what others want to do – particularly the kids – and making sure everyone else is happy doing it. Often women are so preoccupied by all the other stuff that needs doing – worrying about the carpool, whether there’s anything in the fridge to cook for dinner – that the time itself is what sociologists call “contaminated.” I came to learn that women have never had a history or culture of leisure. (Unless you were a nun, one researcher later told me.) That from the dawn of humanity, high status men, removed from the drudge work of life, have enjoyed long, uninterrupted hours of leisure. And in that time, they created art, philosophy, literature, they made scientific discoveries and sank into what psychologists call the peak human experience of flow. Women aren’t expected to flow.

Brigid Schulte: Why time is a feminist issue

Well! This is interesting. 

(via jillianpms)

Oh my god this is exactly what I try to explain to my husband and he never gets it. 

(via magesmagesmages)

And even if you have a good partner who is supportive, it doesn’t help as much as you might think. This sort of thing is baked into the cultural expectations of being female. 

(via gothiccharmschool)

Could Europe Be Powered by African Solar Energy?

For a long time, people looking for big fixes to climate change have been talking about building huge solar installations in North Africa, which gets a lot more sun than most of the places where solar power is big — Germany, for example. But now, it looks as if someone finally is doing it.

Next month in Ouarzazate, Morocco, the first portion of what eventually will be the world’s biggest concentrated solar power plant – called Noor I – is set to go online, according to the Guardian, a British newspaper.

Eventually, when the entire $10 billion complex, which is being financed with assistance from the World Bank and European Union, is completed in 2020, it will generate 580 megawatts of electricity, enough to provide a big portion of Morocco’s energy needs while still leaving plenty of juice for export. The complex could prevent 700,000 tons of carbon dioxide from being spewed into the atmosphere each year.

The plant uses an ingenious technology for getting the most out of sunlight. A huge array of 500,000 crescent-shaped mirrors focus sunlight and transmit it to a single point on a tower. (The mirrors actually have tiny computers in them, which adjust the angle throughout the day to gather the most energy.)

The plant could turn Morocco, which depends upon fossil fuel imports to fill 94 percent of its energy needs, into a major producer of electricity for export. Find out how by clicking here.

An estimated 30 trillion cells in your body—less than a third—are human. The other 70-90% are bacterial and fungal! 

Learn more in the new exhibition, The Secret World Inside You, now open!

Image: Gaby D'Allesandro / © AMNH

Robot Taxi: autonomous mobility for senior citizens in rural areas

Autonomous mobility. A future market, everyone is targeting: Google, Uber, Tesla, Apple, Baidu and a bunch of old-econmoy automotive players. Everybody wishes to triumph with its technology. But have you heard of :DeNA?

The Japanese tech company (originally a mobile gaming company with a net worth of over $1 billion) wants to develop the best smartphone-driven orchestration software for a fleet of robocars. :DeNA just started a new company called “Robot Taxi”, with - not surprisingly - a lucrative future robo-taxi market in mind. The nice thing is, however, that they initially don’t aim for the young urban metropolitan-elite, but rather focus on rural areas and senior citizens. Gizmodo has the story:

Today, it was announced that road tests will begin next year in Kanagawa prefecture, south of Tokyo. Fifty people will travel in trips of two miles from their homes to grocery stores, with a Robot Taxi employee on board as a safety precaution, the Wall Street Journal reports. And the demographics the company is targeting? Senior citizens, and people with no access to public transportation.

Certainly, Japan has a demographic problem and the societal views on robots differ immensely to the rest of the world. But it’s refreshing to see, that (profit oriented) companies exist, which are working on future services with people in mind.

[Robot Taxi] [via gizmodo] [read more about DeNA]